Is Retaking the House a Democratic Pipe Dream?

If Trump drags down the GOP candidates, there's a chance. But there are also a lot of obstacles—of the Democrats' own making.

March 23, 2016

Partisan Democrats get incredibly excited when Republicans
pick lousy candidates who enable them to stumble to victory. Names like
Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Sharron Angle, and Richard Mourdock are etched
in recent political history as extremist conservatives who handed Democrats
seats they were fated to lose. You’ll be hearing references to those names a
lot, because liberals are now back at it, giddy that a Donald Trump
presidential nomination—or a Ted Cruz nomination, for that matter—could put the
30-seat Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives into play.

Some prominent political analysts have begun to agree with
them. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report recently altered ten House ratings to
favor Democrats, commenting, “It’s impossible to know just how bad it could get
for Republicans sharing a ballot with Trump or Cruz.”

True enough. But before liberals get too excited, a reality
check may be in order: To take advantage of the Republicans’ terrible choice at the top of the ticket, Democrats
would have to actually run candidates for the House who can win. A lot of them. And after two
historic wipeouts in recent midterms, combined with a thin bench of state
legislators who can move up and a learned helplessness about redistricting that
assumes many seats off the table before elections even begin, Democrats may not
be well-positioned for sudden viability in a sufficient number ofHouse races.

Evenexperts who
give Democrats a chance to flip the House recognize that everything would have
to go perfectly. Wasserman notes in his report that, despite the
recent alterations, he rates only 31 Republican seats at risk of a loss. (Daily
Kos Elections puts it a bit higher, with 36 Republican seats potentially
threatened.) This means Democrats would have to win virtually every seat in
play, and lose none of their own, just to regain a bare majority.

But it takes years to recruit and train candidates who can
raise enough money to win a congressional election; you can’t throw it together
in a few months. You can see how unprepared Democrats are for this scenario
by looking at how many districts won’t have a Democratic candidate at
all. Nineteen states have already closed their filing process for House
elections, representing 163 Congressional districts. And as Stephen Wolf
points out, in 27 of those 163 seats—about one in six—no Democrat will appear on
the ballot.

Most of those seats are hopelessly Republican, but not all
of them. Six of the districts have a Cook Partisan Voting Index score
(a measure of how much more partisan a district is than the median) of “Republican+10”
or less. Democrats held two of them, the 3rd and 10th
districts in Pennsylvania, as recently as 2010. Illinois’s 16th
district, held by Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, is only R+4, but no
Democrat emerged to challenge him. Given their thin margin for error, Democrats
need surprises in seats like Kinzinger’s to win the majority. But they cannot
get his.

If this pattern continues, dozens more Republicans (in the
states where candidates can still file) will see no general-election opposition
from Democrats. To give one glaring example, Virginia’s 2nd
district, which Mitt Romney won only narrowly in 2012, has an open seat; incumbent
Scott Rigell is retiring. But while two Republicans have announced they’re
running, no
Democrat has declared yet, and filing closes March 31. There’s also no
Democrat currently running in Colorado’s 3rd district, an R+5
seat where incumbent Scott Tipton only won 53
percent of the vote in2012.

Even if most of the Democrat-free districts are deep red,
the lack of candidates on the ballot robs the party of capitalizing on a backlash
against Trump, or a scandal involving a GOP incumbent.
The lack of competition also allows the Republicans to focus more heavily on
seats where they’re strongly challenged, preventing the party from being
stretched thin financially.

Even in districts where they’ve managed to find a candidate, Democrats aren’t always primed to win. Daily Kos Elections’ David
Nir looked at two winnable Republican seats in southern New Jersey, where
antipathy to Trump could produce unexpected results. In the 2nd
district (D+1), Representative Frank LoBiondo will likely face a Democratic challenger who raised
only $55,000 when he was on the ballot in 2014, losing his primary by 64 points. In the 3rd district (R+1),
freshman Representative Tom McArthur will compete against one of two Democrats:
perennial losingcandidate Frederick
LaVergne, or Jim Keady, who got
pummeled in a state legislative race last year.

Other races have similarly weak candidates. The Democrat in
Florida’s toss-up7th
district (R+2), Bill Phillips, has less than $20,000 in his campaign account, nowhere
near enough to mount a serious race. In two California races, the 21st
(D+2) and 25th (R+3) districts, locally supported candidates Daniel
Parra and Lou Vince have raised so few funds that national Democrats sent
“carpetbaggers” from outside the district into the primaries, leading to anger
from local
activists.

In California, opportunities to pick up House seats like
those mentioned above may be frustrated by the unique primary system. Because California’s
June primary will be key for Republicans—with Trump needing a good showing to
reach the 1,237 delegate threshold for the nomination—his presence could drive
high turnout, as it has elsewhere. California’s primary ballots for
non-presidential races allow voters to choose any candidate; the top two
advance to the general election, even if they are from the same party. The possible
upshot: In some districts juiced by Trump (or anti-Trump) turnout, you could
see two Republicans in the general election, keeping Democrats off the November
ballot.

But let’s say everything breaks right for Democrats, and they earn the House majority—narrowly. That may not translate to a bumper crop of progressive legislation,
because in districts where Democrats are facing off in primaries, the winning
candidates won’t necessarily be liberally inclined.For example, in Iowa’s toss-up 1st district (D+5), either
former House Speaker Pat Murphy or Cedar Rapids city councilor Monica Vernon
will face Republican incumbent Rob Blum. But while Murphy was endorsed by
most progressive organizations when he lost narrowly to Blum in 2014, Vernon was
a Republican until 2009. That hasn’t stopped the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee from endorsing Vernon.

In Pennsylvania’s suburban 6th district (R+2),
Democrat Mike Parrish—an oil-services executive and a Republican until 2013 who donated to John McCain
and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns—has picked up several local
party endorsements, and one from former Democratic Governor Ed
Rendell. A second candidate, Lindy Li, could win the primary, but the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee left this winnable race off
their target lists, signaling they have no faith in either Democrat. Nevada’s
4th district (D+4), with Bernie
Sanders supporter Lucy Flores facing more establishment contenders,
represents another ideological fulcrum point.

Even in safe Democratic seats, primaries could tip the
balance of power in the House, ideologically speaking. Maryland’s 8th
district, where Representative Chris Van Hollen is giving up his seat to run
for U.S. Senate, could go to state
Senator Jamie Raskin, seen as a progressive stalwart—or to rich wine
retailer David
Trone, or to Kathleen Matthews (wife of Hardball
host Chris Matthews), a Marriott Hotels executive with significant
financial support from the corporate wing of the party. Without progressive
victories at the primary level, a Democratic House majority won’t be inclined
to rack up the kind of meaningful accomplishments that are the purpose of
elections in the first place.

The Democrats’ lack of preparation for a path
to a House majority is somewhat understandable: Plenty of people, after all, have
been blindsided by Trump’s rise. But the situation only reinforces why it’s an inexcusable mistake to not have viable candidates
available to run everywhere. National parties need to plan for unforeseen
events. And so should those on the left, fighting for the ideological soul of
the Democratic Party.